If you're reading this essay, you probably have an Internet connection, and if you have an Internet connection, you probably have a weblog. We will therefore dispose with the formality of defining what a blog is for technological neophytes and proceed directly to the question that has been on your mind since the very first day when you wrote that the music accompanying your frowny emoticon and paragraph about your significant other was Tom Waits -- can you make money doing this? Maybe even enough to quit your job?

Everybody wants to be paid to blog, even people who make obscene amounts of money in jobs that are equally or even more pleasurable pursuits than lonely HTML opining. However, not everybody could afford to quit work and blog full time; since most bloggers read other blogs solely while they're at work and supposed to be doing something else, there's an economic categorical imperative against everybody quitting work to blog, at least until linking becomes an informal currency, which is actually just a small cultural leap away.

So the natural question becomes: Do you have enough readership to attract advertising, and if you do, is it enough to live on? To answer this question, I looked at the avertising rates on Blogads, a blog advertising collective used by sites of very diverse voices and readership. From this page I obtained three-month advertising rates, number of currently running ads, and ad prices for the entire Blogads family. I then converted the three-month rates times the number of ads for each site at each price level into one annualized number per site. I also took the pageviews and multiplied them times 91 times 5/7, which should give approximately the number of pageviews the site gets on a weekday. (If the site gets significant traffic on weekends, this number will be exaggerated -- but hey, close enough for blog work. If you want to be really accurate, multiply your weekly traffic numbers by 5/7.) I plotted this estimated annual revenue against estimated weekday pageviews and got the following chart:

You'll notice that both axes are on a logarithmic scale, where equally spaced tick marks are an order of magnitude apart. That's because Daily Kos, which pulls in over one million pageviews a day and about $600,000 a year, drives all the othe points on the chart into the bottom left corner by its sheer immensity. Daily Kos: The Wal-Mart of the liberal blogosphere. (I also added a dollar to the revenue estimate to keep the logarithmic scale from throwing away all the blogs that earn nothing.)

I then put a linear trend line through the data points:

The sites that don't have ads at the moment pull the line down; the ones that do pull it back up. You can think of this as a sort of expected value thing that probably works out just right in the end. (i.e. if small blogs of size X earn about $60 per year, and two are have an ad at $10/month and two earn zero, it works out about right.) The line curls a little on chart because of the logarithmic scale.

So, how much could your blog make? The equation of the trend line works out like this.

1. Take your weekday hit count.
2. Multiply that number times $0.403
3. Add $504.06.
4. That's what my blogads regression says your blog should make annually.

If your pageviews are around...	Your ad income should be...	Which is enough to...
100	$540	Live in your parents' basement, but buy your own beer.
1,000	$907	Live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. In Chad.
10,000	$4533	That's a living, if you get food stamps, and live on the street, and do the actual blogging at the public library.
100,000	$40,789	That looks like a lot until you buy health insurance. Keep your day job.
1,000,000	$403,354	Congratulations; you are Kos. But if you live in Berkley, like Kos, I'm sorry; you are still just working-class.

Trackback Bonus Link Count: Want to boost your Google rank into the four-digits? Link to this essay and then email me and I'll link to your post here. Organic cross-promotion has never been easier.

• Slate's political master (and fellow GM-baiter) Mickey Kaus seems to be the first to link, although he isn't happy to lear that blogs don't turn over much cash. Hey, I didn't say Andrew Sullivan.com won't be scooped up for millions -- only that whoever pays that much is going to be sad later.
• Simon Bidwell links to this article with a tone of stoic reflection surpassed only by the view into a mountain pond at left. His blog also has long musings on the state of New Zealand.
• Kos linked to this essay on a midday open thread. I guess he isn't making as much money as the blogads numbers suggested. Either that, or maybe he hasn't checked his bank statement in a while.
• Speaking of being unable to make a living doing what you love, Mike Kim asks whether I'm related to Dan or Jim Duquette. Neither, thank goodness.
• Liberal blogger Moody Loner links to this essay. Despondently.
• ojaiblog self-classifies as a live-with-parents blog. Hopefully this will get you a couple more beer nickles, Tyler.
• Best link yet comes from ElitistPig.com. "I doubt Kos will admit how much he makes, but those numbers might be believable given his ridiculously high hit count. It's nice to think of him as a big bloated cashleech feeding on the body politic of leftist sheepmen." I don't know if that image qualifies as "nice," but it's certainly gripping.
• Survive Outsourcing links here. If any SO readers get here, I'm sorry: The UAW is going to die, and nobody can save it. Save a vacation day for the funeral.
• Circa Bellum either misses the point or has a really low standard of living -- I think the latter.
• I guess there's a link somewhere on Haunted House Dressing.com, but I got too weirded out to find it.
• Crushed By Inertia has a link to here following a Katrina joke. A little too much physics and mortality there for me.
• Tor's Rants Doubles the Snarkfun with a second link to Mike's Lama-hate on the main page.
• Wavedrumor, a rock site, sends us some link action. The best things in life are free, indeed.
• The Dirty Northwest links, a name which if it were "The Dirty Old Northwest" would suggest some sort of Indiana theme. But the only US State they seem to claim is Oregon, which is Northwestern, though I always thought there are dudes cleaning Portland on their knees with toothbrushes 24/7, no?